Incunabulum

What can you say about a person who prefers the lives of poets to the poems themselves? The poems now refer to their past so much that almost nothing is original. How can it be? To paraphrase someone I can't remember once said, Elizabethan England had 20 poets. There's now 20 poets in one neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio. It's all been said!

Give me the lives of the authors instead: Genet's impossible life, Anais Nin's non-self-published secrets, and Rimbaud's back-alley adventures! Their words are surely the same as something somebody did, but their lives, their creative quest, usual sexual and exciting, is always original.

I want to find the Ur-book, the one that makes no reference to others because there's nothing else to reference. This takes imagination, though. How can we imagine The Iliad as original when its progeny are everywhere? How can we understand a world of no Hamlet when we exist with him, when he is a part of our upbringing, like a home from childhood

Even Os Lusiadas, the greatest story no one reads. Even this gorgeous tale begins by ripping off Virgil, and ends I don't know how, because who can finish 10 cantos during commercials? No, better to read about Luis Vaz de Camoes, who lost an eye in battle defending his country in an unnecessary war, who fought the wrong guy in the streets and was jailed for it, who served in an Orient that knew no Occident: human suffering and perseverance that any dummy can get, even if they don't like that heavy stuff. Can't you see him, tossed into the water from a shipwreck, his masterwork in one hand above the waves as he struggles to reach land? Can't you feel that desperation? We need his words to need to know him. His words are for our souls, when we're ready. His struggle is for our lives, ready or not.

He died as his country ceased to be. Vice versa, probably. Either way, it's been done.